INTRODUCTION

DISPATCHES FROM DYSTOPIA, dispatchesfromdystopia.net, which evolved during the past eight years from the less sharply focused "Outside Agitator's Notebook," has become precisely what this blog's new title and domain name describes. It is an ongoing anthology of reports, analyses, commentaries, photographs and other anti-Capitalist testimony from the Dystopia that Capitalism has made of our world. It's epicenter is the post-humanitarian United States of America: our species' self-inflicted Moron Nation and its empire of global-conquest malevolence, the de facto Fourth Reich, the true birthdate of which will eventually be recognized – if indeed our species somehow miraculously survives the present era – as 22 November 1963.
¶Dispatches thus chronicles our relentless subjugation by Capitalism as it (inevitably) reverts to its traditional might-makes-right savagery and – just as Capitalism previously transformed itself into Italian Fascism and German Nazism – as it now matures into a Nazism of uniquely USian form and content. By examining the details of what is occurring, DfD shows how ours is a Dystopia characterized as much by the mindlessness of Moron Nation's Zieg-Heil-equivalent chanting of “USA! USA! USA!” as by the brutality such chanting invariably celebrates – the genocidal, ultimately ecocidal atrocities the Capitalist Ruling Class perpetrates in the name of “profit,” “growth” and USian “Exceptionalism.”
¶Why “USian” rather than American? Because to call this exceptionally fascist empire “America” is to slander as fascists or Nazis all humanitarian-minded peoples of North and South America who valiantly and often fatally resist USiaNazi enslavement. And, yes, “humanitarian” versus “anti-humanitarian” are the only terms that adequately differentiate the two now eternally hostile subspecies into which Capitalism has finally divided Homo sapiens sapiens. On one side are those of us who cling to the so-called Golden Rule and its variants, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the ultimate form of which is Marxism's “from each according to ability, too each according to need.” On the other side are the moral imbeciles – Nazis, fascists, Ayn Rand disciples and all the other psychological zombies that are Capitalism's unique and uniquely apocalyptic spawn.
¶But what then is Capitalism? Though traditionally defined as economics, it is in fact the quintessential patriarchal ethos, the diabolical methodology of building a global empire by conquest and genocide both obvious and clandestine, with post-conquest world governance originally patterned after the despotic management of antebellum slave plantations. Capitalism is thus the forefather of fascism and Nazism, its only possible offspring. Behind its seductive cloak of euphemisms and Big Lies (“manifest destiny,” “easy credit,” “economic freedom,” “self-made man,” “entrepreneur,” “no down payment,” “rugged individualist,” “you too can be rich,” “free will,” etc. ad nauseam), Capitalism is the stench of burning flesh and rotting corpses; the shrieks of napalmed children; the despair of families evicted into the permanent degradation, filth, deadly danger of untreated disease and constant fear of enslavement by arrest or kidnapping that defines USian homelessness; the final agonies of maliciously abandoned patients condemned to death by the deliberately genocidal costs of health care.
¶Ultimately Capitalism is the boundless Evil of global dictatorship by the Christian white male One Percent, a tiny, ruthless cabal of Capitalist aristocrats for whom infinite greed is ultimate virtue and for whom the snuff-film sadism of class warfare provides the ultimate entertainment. Under Capitalism's Fukushima-deadly, Ayn Rand credo of serial-killer moral imbecility – absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and its Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression and bottomless poverty for all the rest of us – these obscenely wealthy despots now impose on us their increasingly overt paradigm of Nazi governance. Not that We the (formerly exempt) People should be surprised; the merciless regimen that is now ours is how the Capitalists have always tyrannized our sisters and brothers in America's First Nations, in the USian ghettos and in all the Capitalist victim realms abroad.
¶Moreover our plight is of our own making. We the People long ago surrendered to our Capitalist overlords. We submit to denial of health care that is everywhere else on this planet deemed a human right; we submit to enslavement by debt; to the outsourcing of our jobs; to bankruptcy; to foreclosure; to eviction and homelessness; to imprisonment in numbers hitherto unequaled in human history; and most of all to the biggest Big Lie of all – the suicidal delusion we somehow remain free despite the Capitalists' no-longer-deniable theft of our liberty and their snickering revocation of the few prefaces to economic democracy our now-powerless unions had once managed to win. Our confinement is ensured, not just by our cowardice but by the invisible but inescapable cage of total surveillance: the electronic barbed wire that has reduced our entire planet to a monstrous concentration camp.
¶Cast off as “surplus human capital” when we are deemed no longer exploitable for profit, we are then methodically exterminated. We are slaughtered as cannon-fodder in the empire's endless wars of profit and conquest; we are murdered by the bullets and truncheons of the federalized and militarized local police; we are fatally poisoned by Capitalism's malignant toxification of our environment; we are slain by denials of health care and social services that are in fact deliberate, euphemism-cloaked policies of slow-motion genocide.
¶Meanwhile our overlords pornographically multiply their own wealth by knowingly destroying the planetary conditions upon which all sentient life depends. More recently – as if to demonstrate the infinite magnitude of their Evil by provoking unsurvivable thermonuclear apocalypse (and not coincidentally in fulfillment of a malevolent scheme by Adolf Hitler himself) – they have imposed on the Ukraine the anti-Russian war-mongering and anti-Jewish violence of an avowedly Nazi puppet government. And now, in the person of Donald Trump and his appointees, the USian tyrannosaur has come home to gorge on its final and terminally ironic meal, the denizens of Moron Nation itself, the people who by their prideful ignorance and hatefulness loosed this demonically insatiable monster on the entire world.
But in these times our ability to effectively resist is obstructed not only by the USian regime of inescapable surveillance, but by the dreadful undertow of Moron Nation's intellectual and psychological paralysis: the deliberate deceptions and outright ignorance fostered by the Capitalist “education” system; by Capitalism's “mainstream media” propaganda machine (which is owned by the same smirking plutocrats whose vassal politicians so gleefully oppress us); and by the physical and psychic terrorism of Capitalism's manufactured crises.
¶Yet resist we must. As always, art – sometimes even unwittingly – depicts our present circumstances and so foretells our future. And as it says in a breathtakingly apt, wrenchingly poignant anthem grown increasingly popular far beyond its video-game origin, “shadows fall and hope is gone; steel your heart; the dawn will come.”

"...our relentless subjugation by capitalism..."We the People have been reduced to slavery and serfdom by Capitalist governance -- absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent and their Ruling Class vassals, zero-tolerance oppression for all the rest of us -- and the CIA's Operation Chaos exemplifies Capitalism's darkest and most malevolent aspects.

These are some of the very few photographs that survived the 1983 fire that destroyed my life's work, not just most of my pictures but nearly all my writing including two books in progress and all the associated research. Some of these photos shown here escaped the flames because they were with me in my portfolio case; others were produced digitally from negatives dug out of the rubble a year later. The images of obvious print-quality were made on DuPont Varilure paper, which had the highest silver content of all commercial papers and thus produced such intense tonalities, they often seemed illuminated by their own internal light sources. But that sort of photographic quality is now forever beyond our common reach, either gone like Varilure or so prohibitively expensive it is available only to the obscenely pampered dilettantes who produce the aesthetic pabulum favored by the One Percent. Photography as I knew it is dead -- as dead as my career was after the fire and its ensuing clinical depression -- but this body of work provides a glimpse of what was lost and what might have been. All photos copyright Loren Bliss.

In photography, a sandwich is a collage made by printing two or more negatives simultaneously. Collage is a medium that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember -- probably since I was a child experimenting with finger paints, glue and newspapers -- but I never took it seriously until, sometime in my early 20s and still thinking myself a painter-to-be, I discovered the works of Jasper Johns. Now it seems to me making sandwiches is to conventional photography what poetry is to prose: not just an intellectual exercise, but the opening of a doorway to the Mysterious Otherness I know as the Muse, from whom (sometimes in fulfilment of that McLuhanesque notion of art as prophecy) the currents of real creation invariably flow, whether swift and startling as a lightening strike or slow and soft as cottonwood seeds adrift on subtle summer air. (Collage and photographic sandwiches copyright Loren Bliss 2009-2012.)

When I returned to New York City in 1965 I was immediately impressed by the contrast between the graffiti I had encountered "out in America" -- the South and Middle West -- and what I saw in Manhattan. While the form and content of graffiti is sociologically important – possibly a semiotic indicator without peer -- I found the graffiti of Manhattan singularly appealing, the intellectual and aesthetic equivalents of a long-overdue breath of fresh air, and within a few days I had begun documenting it with 35mm and 120 film. (The opening photograph of this series was obviously made far from Manhattan, but I included it to establish an essential contrast.) Many more details about this particular body of work, which I briefly resumed when I went back to the City again in 1983, then abandoned after that year's career-terminating fire, are in my post of January 7, 2010. Yes I regard the best urban graffiti as genuine art, but too much of it, alas, is nothing more than a human variant on the mammalian practice of marking territory with spurts of urine: "I wuz here." All photos by Loren Bliss, copyright dates as noted.

Supporters of health care reform and a much smaller number of health care reform's opponents -- each faction identified by its picket-signs -- gathered for the "town hall" meeting called by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) in Lakewood on August 25, 2009. Originally set for Lakewood City Hall, the event was rescheduled and moved to Lang Stadium to accommodate an unprecedented mobilization of pro-reform people. Cops estimated the crowd at about 2500. Photos by Loren Bliss copyright 2009.

Best Site for Suppressed Assassination FactsThe late Mae Brussell was our most relentless researcher into the murder of President John Kennedy and many other such outrages. Her legacy is a damning list of the USian Empire's darkest secrets.

Best, Most Thorough Documentation on the CIA's Destruction of the 1960s Counterculture Ms. Brussel outdid herself in her nobody-dares-publish-it investigative report exposing how the CIA's Operation Chaos destroyed the 1960s Counterculture. (My assumption is the Agency, with its Ivy-League analysts and their knowledge of pagan mythology, recognized the Counterculture's anti-patriarchal, resurrection-of-the-Goddess direction, understood it as a far greater threat to Capitalism than Marxism and responded with the murderous efficiency inherited from Gestapo predecessors.)

Communist Labor Party Communism as it is evolving in the United States after the murder of the American Dream and the slaying of the U.S. experiment in representative democracy.

Consortium News Superb reporting and analysis. Founder/Editor Robert Parry exposed Reagan's Iran-Contra scheming and has been persecuted by the capitalists ever since.

der SpiegelMainstream German newspaper that is often a valuable source of news about Western European politics.

Global ResearchA genuinely independent news site -- neither definitively Left nor Right -- that often covers stories suppressed by U.S. Mainstream Media, which (let us never forget), is owned by the same One Percenters who own the Democratic (sic) and Republican parties and thereby control all U.S. governance at every level.

Gun Owners of America Fanatically hard-Right (and often ChristoFascist as well), it is nevertheless the best source for information about the One Percent's efforts to forcibly disarm the U.S. 99 Percent.

International Marxist Archive All of Marxism's defining texts defiantly uploaded to the Internet by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as its final contribution to humanity's eternal struggle for economic democracy -- without which there is no democracy at all.

RTFormerly "Russia Today," it accurately covers U.S. news the "mainstream media" propaganda machine routinely suppresses. Its notable work includes the nation's best coverage of the Occupy Movement (2011-2012), and the ongoing struggles of Black Lives Matter, Water Protectors and other such groups against the Empire's now-openly-fascist policies of homeland governance.

Second Amendment FoundationUnmistakably conservative, it is also the best source on legal action in defense of our right to keep and bear arms.

Socialist Worker Best Marxist website in the United States (never mind its purely ideological essays reflect only Leon Trotsky's viewpoint), with news reporting and analysis that is far superior to anything fed us by capitalism's "mainstream media" propaganda machine.

Southern Poverty Law CenterBest source of information on the burgeoning plague of Nazi, ChristoFascist and KuKluxKlan-type hate groups in the USian imperial homeland.

Theocracy WatchCornell University's in-depth source on the escalating campaign to impose zero-tolerance Christian theocracy on the USian Homeland. It is flawed only by its refusal to recognize the Democratic (sic) Party's mostly clandestine collaboration with the openly theocratic Republicans -- a collaboration revealed in frightening detail by Jeff Sharlet's "The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" (Harper: 2008).

Unless otherwise noted, all material herein is copyrighted by Loren Bliss and/or Dispatches from Dystopia. Reproduction for non-profit purposes is permitted as long as it identifies the author or photographer and includes a link to the original text. To arrange for-profit reproduction, contact Loren Bliss via the comment facility.

11/25/2013

Eviction Shows How Vicious U.S. Has Become 50 Years after JFK Murder

Here we see the aftermath of an eviction, one of the innumerable ways governments in the United States serve the nation's increasingly merciless capitalist masters, in this instance by the forcible ouster of a formerly middle-class woman too old to be exploitable for maximum profit – that is, too elderly to be allowed another job in the capitalist economy, but probably a decade too young for the meager refuge provided by Social Security. After government goons forced the woman out of her apartment, they piled all her possessions in the building's side yard. The date of the eviction, 22 November 2013, was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who had sought to make the U.S. a land in which poverty and its consequences were afflictions of the past. Top: scavengers, themselves desperately poor, began gathering within hours. Bottom: as it looked the next morning, after people swarmed all night to snatch away anything of value. Fujicolor 800, Pentax MX, Tokina 70mm-210mm f/4, exposures not recorded. Photographs by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

*

AS IF TO CELEBRATE the coup of 22 November 1963 – President John Fitzgerald Kennedy gunned down in Dallas, the United States set on the road to becoming the most omnipotently powerful and wantonly murderous empire in recorded history – the enforcers of capitalist governance in the seaport city of Tacoma chose the assassination's 50th anniversary to evict an elderly woman from a ramshackle apartment building. The irony is almost too perfect: the ruination of a human life on the date the man who increased Social Security stipends by 20 percent and fought to end economic atrocities was slain by those One Percent aristocrats who would ruin us all – exactly as their sons and grandsons are doing today.

In this context it is not inappropriate to describe the personal horror inflicted by eviction, a toxic muddle of terror, shame, fury and woe, as an emotional microcosm of the horror inflicted on an entire nation by the assassination itself. Either is impossible to know unless you have experienced it firsthand. Both are terminal in the sense that whether you realize it or not, life as you knew it has ended forever.

In an eviction, whatever material or psychological assets remained in your life are ripped away as if by volcano or earthquake or tornado or bombing. It is, as I know too well, the same when you are victimized by fire. Everything you thought defined you as you, everything that sustained your identity, is destroyed without mercy, exactly as suggested by the above photographs. The devastation is total. Though post-traumatic recovery is possible, the worst-in-the-industrial-world economic viciousness of today's USian Empire guarantees your healing will painfully slow – if indeed it is allowed at all.

I do not know the evicted woman's name. I saw her only once. She was scurrying back and forth around her piled possessions as if she could protect them from the inevitable scavengers and thieves. She was alone, a slender and bespectacled woman in a long black wool winter coat that was trimmed with fur. It was a fine coat, something a self-assured professional might have worn to work. But now its wearer moved with the same bewilderment and terror I had once seen displayed by a little gray vole who darted in and out of my rural Washington cabin after I had discarded and burned an old armchair and unknowingly destroyed her nest and killed her brood of tiny young, an error for which after 18 years I yet grieve, an example of the harm we humans do even without ill intentions.

Journalistic instinct, powerfully alive despite decades of involuntary retirement, demanded I speak with the woman and photograph her with her belongings. Human instinct, equally powerful, restrained me from intruding on her wretchedness. But my day was already allotted to private errands via public transport, and the arrival of a city bus rescued me from the angst of indecision. Now, because I never talked with her, I know her only by the many books she was forced to abandon, one of which was a publication of the Princeton Science Library, The Miner's Canary: Understanding the Mysteries of Extinction, written by Niles Eldredge. Yet who, I wondered, would understand the mysteries of this woman's hopes and dreams? Who would unriddle the destruction inflicted on her by capitalism? Who would care enough to chronicle her fate?

***

The victimization inflicted by assassins is usually as immediate as the victimization inflicted by an eviction. Whenever the assassins' purpose is the death of liberty and the imposition of tyranny, we the people are the ultimate victims. In Chile, for example, Augusto Pinochet's USian-trained and funded agents began torturing and murdering terrified mothers, fathers and children literally minutes after the death of the nation's democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.

But here in the USian homeland, where the capitalist masters of the world have proven themselves the most diabolically cunning tyrants in human history, they use a more gradual approach.

After they murdered President Kennedy, they liquidated all the other influential men for whom democracy was more than a convenient Big Lie. They killed Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy. Then the killers stole our freedom gradually and by stealth, taking it piece-by-piece in the duplicitous and tragically accurate belief we were too stupid to notice and too cowardly to resist. The result is the malevolence that oppresses us today, a perfect example of which is the eviction that was imposed on the old woman in Tacoma.

This is not, of course, what the government tells us. But any 99 Percenter who still doubts it is essentially the true story of what has been done to us needs only read JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, a genuinely pivotal work by James W. Douglass (Maryknoll: 2008). The antithesis of conspiranoid dreck, its text is an epic of historical analysis. It details the long slow death of democratic process that culminated in the most destructive Big Lie ever fed the now hopelessly dumbed-down U.S. electorate: “change we can believe in” – as if, after 22 November 1963 and the events it facilitated, there might ever again be a new American Dream.

And now we are learning the dream is dead beyond resurrection. Now we are awakening to the fact that under capitalism there will never be an end to joblessness and inescapable debt-slavery and foreclosure and eviction and homelessness and death by untreated sickness and murder by government-inflicted starvation and everywhere the ruins of hope such as were left in the wake of this morning's ironically celebratory eviction.

***

Because ammunition is expensive and shooting-related paperwork is a pain in the ass, the official goons who carry out evictions typically bang on your door before first light. They know there is much less likelihood you will fight when you are rousted from slumber and assaulted immediately thereafter. The goons flash their badges and force you out of your home, sometimes at gunpoint, often still in your pajamas or nightgown. Then they pile your cherished belongings helter-skelter in the yard, and if they are feeling especially sadistic, which frequently they are, they make sure your furniture grinds your best clothes into the dirt and food spills onto your books and papers.

Next they warn you that if you try to re-enter the premises, you will be jailed for criminal trespass, which used to be mostly a misdemeanor but now in these times of ever-worsening poverty is vindictively re-criminalized as a felony to help guarantee the masters of for-profit prisons an endless supply of slaves. Sometimes you're given eight or 12 or 24 hours to clear your property off the landlord's yard, after which everything you couldn't move is his. Finally you are alone and in bottomless shock.

The unthinkable is now real. You are homeless. Your entire consciousness is fear. And now in addition to the emotional horror, there is also the physical horror of life in the jungle of the streets – the total negation of everything you ever achieved or were. Now your only reality is the absolute certainty you will be victimized by everyone stronger than you are, that you will be raped if you are a woman however plain or man of less than obviously formidable strength and violence. You are no longer considered a person. Unless you have a damn good lawyer – and what homeless person can afford that – you are no longer allowed any of the rights and privileges of personhood whether individual or corporate. Now you are merely one of The Homeless, which means that under the Ayn Rand credo that now rules the USian Empire, the very best you can expect from your fellow humans is derision, rejection, contempt and hatred if you are very lucky, and savage beatings – especially by the teenage children of the rich – if you are not.

As it is done unto the least of us, so it is done unto us all – equally true whether said by Jesus or Marx, no matter in terms biblical or dialectic. But capitalism by its elevation of infinite greed to maximum virtue consciously rejects every moral and ethical precept our species ever dared assert. And because the capitalists are ever more in need of protection from their victims, soon they bribe the politicians into capitalist governance, which is absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation for all the rest of us. Such is our lot 50 years after the murder of President Kennedy, the assassination that killed both a man and a nation, hexed it and vexed it into the realm that hurls an old woman out into the merciless cold and the deadly damp of the zero-tolerance late November Pacific Northwest coastal streets.